What's the use of being a little boy if you are going to grow up to be a man?

-Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (1937)

1 AN INTRODUCTION TO FEMALE MASCULINITY

Masculinity without Men

The Real Thing

What is "masculinity"? This has been probably the most common ques­ tion that I have faced over the past five years while writing on the topic of female masculinity. If masculinity is not the social and cultural and indeed political expression of maleness, then what is it? I do not claim to have any definitive answer to this question, but I do have a few proposals about why masculinity must not and cannot and should not reduce down to the male body and its effects. I also venture to assert that although we seem to have a difficult time defining masculinity, as a society we have little trouble in recognizing it, and indeed we spend massive amounts of time and money ratifying and supporting the versions of masculinity that we enjoy and trust; many of these "heroic masculinities" depend absolutely on the sub­ ordination of alternative masculinities. I claim in this book that far from being an imitation of maleness, female masculinity actually affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity. In other words, female masculinities are framed as the rejected scraps of dominant mas­ culinity in order that male masculinity may appear to be the real thing.

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But what we understand as heroic masculinity has been produced by and across both male and female bodies. This opening chapter does not simply offer a conventional theoreti­ cal introduction to the enterprise of conceptualizing masculinity without men; rather, it attempts to compile the myths and fantasies about mas­ culinity that have ensured that masculinity and maleness are profoundly difficult to pry apart. I then offer, by way of a preliminary attempt to re­ imagine masculinity, numerous examples of alternative masculinities in fiction, film, and lived experience. These examples are mostly queer and female, and they show clearly how important it is to recognize alternative masculinities when and where they emerge. Throughout this introduction, I detail the many ways in which female masculinity has been blatantly ignored both in the culture at large and within academic studies of mascu­ linity. This widespread indifference to female masculinity, I suggest, has clearly ideological motivations and has sustained the complex social struc­ tures that wed masculinity to maleness and to power and domination. I firmly believe that a sustained examination of female masculinity can make crucial interventions within gender studies, cultural studies, queer studies, and mainstream discussions of gender in general. Masculinity in this society inevitably conjures up notions of power and legitimacy and privilege; it often symbolically refers to the power of the state and to uneven distributions of wealth. Masculinity seems to extend outward into patriarchy and inward into the family; masculinity repre­ sents the power of inheritance, the consequences of the traffic in women, and the promise of social privilege. But, obviously, many other lines of identification traverse the terrain of masculinity, dividing its power into complicated differentials of class, race, sexuality, and gender. If what we call "dominant masculinity" appears to be a naturalized relation between maleness and power, then it makes little sense to examine men for the con­ tours of that masculinity's social construction. Masculinity, this book will claim, becomes legible as masculinity where and when it leaves the white male middle-class body. Arguments about excessive masculinity tend to focus on black bodies (male and female), latino/a bodies, or working-class bodies, and insufficient masculinity is all too often figured by Asian bodies or upper-class bodies; these stereotypical constructions of variable mascu­ linity mark the process by which masculinity becomes dominant in the sphere of white middle-class maleness. But all too many studies that cur­ rently attempt to account for the power of white masculinity recenter this

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white male body by concentrating all their analytical efforts on detailing the forms and expressions of white male dominance. Numerous studies of Elvis, white male youth, white male feminism, men and marriage, and domestications of maleness amass information about a subject whom we know intimately and ad nauseam. This study professes a degree of indiffer­ ence to the whiteness of the male and the masculinity of the white male and the project of naming his power: male masculinity figures in my project as a hermeneutic, and as a counterexample to the kinds of masculinity that seem most informative about gender relations and most generative of social change. This book seeks Elvis only in the female Elvis impersonator Elvis Herselvis; it searches for the political contours of masculine privilege not in men but in the lives of aristocratic European cross-dressing women in the 1920s; it describes the details of masculine difference by comparing not men and women but butch lesbians and female-to-male transsexuals; it examines masculinity's iconicity not in the male matinee idol but in a history of butches in cinema; it finds, ultimately, that the shapes and forms of modern masculinity are best showcased within female masculinity. How else to begin a book on female masculinity but by deposing one of the most persistent of male heroes: Bond, James Bond. To illustrate my point that modern masculinity is most easily recognized as female mascu­ linity, consider the James Bond action film, in which male masculinity very often appears as only a shadow of a more powerful and convincing alterna­ tive masculinity. In Goldeneye (1995), for example, Bond battles the usual array of bad guys: Commies, Nazis, mercenaries, and a superaggressive violent femme type. He puts on his usual performance of debonair action adventure hero, and he has his usual supply of gadgetry to aid him - a re­ tractable belt, a bomb disguised as a pen, a laser weapon watch, and so on. But there's something curiously lacking in Goldeneye, namely, credible masculine power. Bond's boss, M, is a noticeably butch older woman who calls Bond a dinosaur and chastises him for being a misogynist and a sex­ ist. His secretary, Miss Moneypenny, accuses him of sexual harassment, his male buddy betrays him and calls him a dupe, and ultimately women seem not to go for his charms-bad suits and lots of sexual innuendo­ which seem as old and as ineffective as his gadgets. Masculinity, in this rather actionless film, is primarily prosthetic and, in this and countless other action films, has little if anything to do with biological maleness and signifies more often as a technical special effect. In Goldeneye it is M who most convincingly performs masculinity, and she

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does so partly by exposing the sham of Bond's own performance. It is M who convinces us that sexism and misogyny are not necessarily part and parcel of masculinity, even though historically it has become difficult, if not impossible, to untangle masculinity from the oppression of women. The action adventure hero should embody an extreme version of norma­ tive masculinity, but instead we find that excessive masculinity turns into a parody or exposure of the norm. Because masculinity tends to manifest as natural gender itself, the action flick, with its emphases on prosthetic extension, actually undermines the heterosexuality of the hero even as it extends his masculinity. So, in Goldeneye, for example, Bond's masculinity is linked not only to a profoundly unnatural form of masculine embodi­ ment but also to gay masculinities. In the scene in which Bond goes to pick up his newest set of gadgets, a campy and almost queeny science nerd gives Bond his brand-new accessories and demonstrates each one with great enthusiasm. It is no accident that the science nerd is called Agent Q. We might read Agent Q as a perfect model of the interpenetration of queer and dominant regimes-Q is precisely an agent, a queer subject who exposes the workings of dominant heterosexual masculinity. The gay mas­ culinity of Agent Q and the female masculinity of M provide a remarkable representation of the absolute dependence of dominant masculinities on minority masculinities. When you take his toys away, Bond has very little propping up his performance of masculinity. Without the slick suit, the half smile, the ciga­ rette lighter that transforms into a laser gun, our James is a hero without the action or the adventure. The masculinity of the white male, what we might call "epic masculinity," depends absolutely, as any Bond flick dem­ onstrates, on a vast subterranean network of secret government groups, well-funded scientists, the army, and an endless supply of both beauti­ ful bad babes and beautiful good babes, and finally it relies heavily on an immediately recognizable "bad guy." The "bad guy" is a standard generic feature of epic masculinity narratives: think only of Paradise Lost and its eschatological separation between God and Devil; Satan, if you like, is the original bad guy. Which is not to say that the bad guy's masculinity bars him from the rewards of male privilege-on the contrary, bad guys may also look like winners, but they just tend to die more quickly. Indeed, there is currently a line of clothing called Bad Boy that revels in the particular power of the bad guy and reveals how quickly transgression adds up to nothing more than consumerism in the sphere of the white male. Another

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line of clothing that indulges in the consumer potential of male rebellion is No Fear gear. This label features advertisements with skydiving, surfing, car-racing men who show their manliness by wearing the No Fear logo and practicing death-defying stunts in their leisure time. To test how domes­ ticated this label actually is, we have only to imagine what No Fear might mean for women. It might mean learning how to shoot a gun or working out or taking up a martial art, but it would hardly translate into skydiving. Obviously, then, No Fear is a luxury and can in no way be equated with any form of social rebellion. There is also a long literary and cinematic history that celebrates the rebellion of the male. If James Stewart, Gregory Peck, and Fred Astaire represent a few faces of good-guy appeal, James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Robert De Niro represent the bad-guy appeal, and really it becomes quite hard to separate one group from the other. Obviously, bad-boy representa­ tions in the 1950s captured something of a white working-class rebellion against middle-class society and against particular forms of domestication, but today's rebel without a cause is tomorrow's investment banker, and male rebellion tends toward respectability as the rewards for conformity quickly come to outweigh the rewards for social rebellion. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, what's the point of being a rebel boy if you are going to grow up to be a man? Obviously, where and when rebellion ceases to be white middle-class male rebellion (individualized and localized within the lone male or even generalized into the boy gang) and becomes class rebel­ lion or race rebellion, a very different threat emerges.

Tomboys

What happens when boy rebellion is located not in the testosterone­ induced pout of the hooligan but in the sneer of the tomboy? Tomboyism generally describes an extended childhood period of female masculinity. If we are to believe general accounts of childhood behavior, tomboyism is quite common for girls and does not generally give rise to parental fears. Because comparable cross-identification behaviors in boys do often give rise to quite hysterical responses, we tend to believe that female gender deviance is much more tolerated than male gender deviance.' I am not sure that tolerance in such matters can be measured or at any rate that responses to childhood gender behaviors necessarily tell us anything con­ crete about the permitted parameters of adult male and female gender

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deviance. Tomboyism tends to be associated with a "natural" desire for the greater freedoms and mobilities enjoyed by boys. Very often it is read as a sign of independence and self-motivation, and tomboyism may even be en­ couraged to the extent that it remains comfortably linked to a stable sense of a girl identity. Tomboyism is punished, however, when it appears to be the sign of extreme male identification (taking a boy's name or refusing girl clothing of any type) and when it threatens to extend beyond childhood and into adolescence.2 Teenage tomboyism presents a problem and tends to be subject to the most severe efforts to reorient. We could say that tomboyism is tolerated as long as the child remains prepubescent; as soon as puberty begins, however, the full force of gender conformity descends on the girl. Gender conformity is pressed onto all girls, not just tomboys, and this is where it becomes hard to uphold the notion that male femininity presents a greater threat to social and familial stability than female masculinity. Female adolescence represents the crisis of coming of age as a girl in a male-dominated society. If adolescence for boys represents a rite of passage (much celebrated in Western literature in the form of the bildungsroman), and an ascension to some version (however attenuated) of social power, for girls, adolescence is a lesson in restraint, punishment, and repression. It is in the context offemale adolescence that the tomboy instincts of millions of girls are remodeled into compliant forms of femininity. That any girls do emerge at the end of adolescence as masculine women is quite amazing. The growing visibility and indeed respectability oflesbian communities to some degree facilitate the emergence of masculine young women. But as even a cursory survey of popular cinema confirms, the image of the tomboy can be tolerated only within a narrative of blossoming womanhood; within such a narrative, tomboyism represents a resistance to adulthood itself rather than to adult femininity. In both the novel and film versions of the classic tomboy narrative The Member ofthe Wedding, by Carson McCullers, tomboy Frankie Addams fights a losing battle against womanhood, and the text locates womanhood or femininity as a crisis of representation that confronts the heroine with unacceptable life options. As her brother's wedding approaches, Frankie Addams pronounces herself mired in a realm of unbelonging, outside the symbolic partnership of the wedding but also alienated from belonging in almost every category that might describe her. Mccullers writes: "It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and

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Figure 1. "She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world." Julie Harris as Frankie Addams and Ethel Waters as Berenice in The Member of the Wedding (1953), directed by Fred Zinneman.

was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie was an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid." 3 McCullers positions Frankie on the verge of adolescence ("when Frankie was twelve years old") and in the midst of an enduring state of being "unjoined": "She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world." While childhood in general may qualify as a period of "unbelonging," for the boyish girl arriv­ ing on the doorstep of womanhood, her status as "unjoined" marks her out for all manner of social violence and opprobrium. As she dawdles in the last light of childhood, Frankie Addams has become a tomboy who "hung around in doorways, and she was afraid." As a genre, the tomboy film, as I show in chapter 6, "Looking Butch," suggests that the categories available to women for racial, gendered, and sexual identification are simply inadequate. In her novel, McCullers shows this inadequacy to be a direct result of the tyranny of language-a struc­ ture that fixes people and things in place artificially but securely. Frankie tries to change her identity by changing her name: "Why is it against the

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law to change your name?" she asks Berenice (107). Berenice answers: "Be­ cause things accumulate around your name," and she stresses that without names, confusion would reign and "the whole world would go crazy." But Berenice also acknowledges that the fixity conferred by names also traps people into many different identities, racial as well as gendered: "We all of us somehow caught .... And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught" (n3). Frankie thinks that naming represents the power of definition, and name changing confers the power to reimagine identity, place, relation, and even gender. "I wonder if it is against the law to change your name," says Frankie, "Or add to it.... Well I don't care .... F. Jasmine Addams" (15). Psychoanalysis posits a crucial relationship between language and desire such that language structures desire and expresses therefore both the full­ ness and the futility of human desire-full because we always desire, futile because we are never satisfied. Frankie in particular understands desire and sexuality to be the most regimented forms of social conformity-we are supposed to desire only certain people and only in certain ways, but her desire does not work that way, and she finds herself tom between longing and belonging. Because she does not desire in conventional ways, Frankie seeks to avoid desire altogether. Her struggle with language, her attempts to remake herself through naming and remake the world with a new order of being, are ultimately heroic, but unsuccessful. McCullers's pessimism has to do with a sense of the overwhelming "order of things," an order that cannot be affected by the individual, and works through things as basic as language, and forces nonmembers into memberships they cannot fulfill. My book refuses the futility long associated with the tomboy narrative and instead seizes on the opportunity to recognize and ratify differently gendered bodies and subjectivities. Moving from the nineteenth century to the present and examining diaries, court cases, novels, letters, films, per­ formances, events, critical essays, videos, news items, and testimonies, this book argues for the production of new taxonomies, what Eve K. Sedgwick humorously called "nonce taxonomies" in Epistemology of the Closet, classi­ fications of desire, physicality, and subjectivity that attempt to intervene in hegemonic processes of naming and defining. Nonce taxonomies are cate­ gories that we use daily to make sense of our worlds but that work so well that we actually fail to recognize them. In this book, I attempt to bring some of the nonce taxonomies of female masculinity into view, and I detail the histories of the suppression of these categories. Here, and in the rest

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of the book, I am using the topic of female masculinity to explore a queer subject position that can successfully challenge hegemonic models of gen­ der conformity. Female masculinity is a particularly fruitful site of investi­ gation because it has been vilified by heterosexist and feminist/womanist programs alike; unlike male femininity, which fulfills a kind of ritual func­ tion in male homosocial cultures, female masculinity is generally received by hetero- and homo-normative cultures as a pathological sign of misiden­ tification and maladjustment, as a longing to be and to have a power that is always just out of reach. Within a lesbian context, female masculinity has been situated as the place where patriarchy goes to work on the female psy­ che and reproduces misogyny within femaleness. There have been to date remarkably few studies or theories about the inevitable effects of a fully articulated female masculinity on a seemingly fortified male masculinity. Sometimes female masculinity coincides with the excesses of male su­ premacy, and sometimes it codifies a unique form of social rebellion; often female masculinity is the sign of sexual alterity, but occasionally it marks heterosexual variation; sometimes female masculinity marks the place of pathology, and every now and then it represents the healthful alternative to what are considered the histrionics of conventional femininities. I want to carefully produce a model of female masculinity that remarks on its multiple forms but also calls for new and self-conscious affirmations of different gender taxonomies. Such affirmations begin not by subverting masculine power or taking up a position against masculine power but by turning a blind eye to conventional masculinities and refusing to engage. Frankie Addams, for example, constitutes her rebellion not in opposition to the law but through indifference to the law: she recognizes that it may be against the law to change one's name or add to it, but she also has a simple response to such illegal activity: "Well, I don't care." I am not sug­ gesting in this book that we follow the futile path of what Foucault calls "saying no to power," but I am asserting that power may inhere within dif­ ferent forms of refusal: "Well, I don't care."

Queer Methodologies

This book deploys numerous methodologies in order to pursue the mul­ tiple forms of gender variance presented within female masculinity. On account of the interdisciplinary nature of my project, I have had to craft a methodology out of available disciplinary methods. Deploying what I

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would call a "queer methodology," I have used some combination of tex­ tual criticism, ethnography, historical survey, archival research, and the production of taxonomies. I call this methodology "queer" because it at­ tempts to remain supple enough to respond to the various locations of information on female masculinity and betrays a certain disloyalty to con­ ventional disciplinary methods. Obviously, I could have produced meth­ odological consistency by confining myself to literary texts, but the queer methodology used here, then, typifies just one of the forms of refusal that I discussed in my last section. Although some of the most informative work on alternative sexual com­ munities has come in the form of ethnography, and although autobiogra­ phies and narrative histories tend to be the material that we turn to for information on sexual identities, there is nonetheless some disagreement among queer scholars about how we should collect and interpret such information on sexual identity. Indeed, some of the most bitter and long­ lasting disagreements within queer studies have been about disciplinarity and methodology. Whereas some cultural studies proponents have argued that social science methods of collecting, collating, and presenting sexual data through surveys and other methods of social research tend to redis­ cover the sexual systems they already know rather than finding out about those they do not, social science proponents argue that cultural studies scholars do not pay enough attention to the material realities of queer life. And while there has been plenty of discussion in the academy about the need for interdisciplinary work, there has been far less support for such work in the university at large. A project such as this one, therefore, risks drawing criticism from historians for not providing a proper history, from literary critics for not focusing on literary texts, and from social scientists for not deploying the traditional tools of social science research. While I take full responsibility for all the errors I may make in my attempts to produce readings and histories and ethnography, I also recognize that this book exemplifies the problem confronted by queer studies itself: How do we forge queer methodologies while as scholars we reside in traditional departments? At least one method of sex research that I reject in creating a queer methodology is the traditional social science project of surveying people and expecting to squeeze truth from raw data. In a review essay in the New York Review of Books about a series of new sex surveys, R. C. Lewontin

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comments on the difficulty associated with this social science approach to sexuality: "Given the social circumstances of sexual activity, there seems no way to find out what people do 'in the bedroom' except to ask them. But the answers they give cannot be put to the test of incredulity."• Lewontin sug­ gests that people tend not to be truthful when it comes to reporting on their own sexual behavior (men exaggerate and women downplay, for example), and there are no ways to make allowances for personal distortion within social science methods. Furthermore, social scientists seem not to be con­ cerned with the high levels of untruth in relation to sexuality but spend all their energy on solving methodological problems. Ultimately, Lewontin claims-and I think he has a point-social science surveys are "demonstra­ tions of what their planners already believed they knew to be true" (25). At a time when the humanities are under severe scrutiny and attack, it is im­ portant to point to the reliance of social science methods on strategies such as narrative analysis, interpretation, and speculation. As Lewontin says in his conclusion: "How then can there be a social science? The answer surely is to be less ambitious and stop trying to make sociology into a natural sci­ ence although it is, indeed, the study of natural objects" (29). This is not to say, however, that traditional social science research methods such as questionnaires are never appropriate. Indeed, there are certain questions that can be answered only by survey methods in the realm of sexuality (i.e., how many lesbians are using dental dams? What age-groups or social classes do these lesbians belong to?), but all too often surveys are used to try to gather far less factual information, and all subtlety tends to be lost.' There is some irony in the apparent impossibility of applying traditional social science methods to the study of sex because as queer sociologists are all too quick to point out, many of the theoretical systems that we use to talk about sex, such as social constructionism, come from sociology. In a recent "queer" issue of Sociological Theory, a group of sociologists attempted to account for the currently strained relations between socio­ logical theory and queer theory. Steven Epstein pointed out that sociology asserted that sexuality was socially constructed and indeed that "without seeking to minimize the importance of other disciplines, I would suggest that neither queer theory nor lesbian and gay studies in general could be imagined in their present forms without the contributions of sociological theory." 6 Arlene Stein and Ken Plummer continue Epstein's line of inquiry and add a critique of the present state of queer theory:

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Queer theorists ... appreciate the extent to which the texts of literature and mass culture shape sexuality, but their weakness is that they rarely, if ever, move beyond the text. There is a dangerous tendency for the new queer theorists to ignore "real" queer life as it is materially experi­ enced across the world, while they play with the free-floating signifiers of texts.'

In an effort to restore sociology to its proper place within the study of sexuality, Stein and Plummer have reinvested here in a clear and verifi­ able difference between the real and the textual, and they designate textual analysis as a totally insular activity with no referent, no material conse­ quences, and no intellectual gain. But as Lewontin's review suggested, it is precisely this belief in the real and the material as separate from the represented and the textual that creates the problems of survey analysis. To be fair, Stein and Plummer are clearly not suggesting merely a quan­ titative approach to the study of sexuality and queer subcultures, but they do, on some level, seem to have re-created some essential divide between the truth of sexual behavior and the fiction of textual analysis. The answer to the problem of how to study sexuality, I am trying to suggest, must lie to some extent in an interdisciplinary approach that can combine information culled from people with information culled from texts. So, whereas Cindy Patton, for example, in "Tremble Hetero Swine," remarks with dismay on the dominance of "textually based forms of queer theory," we must question whether there is a form of queer theory or sexual theory that is not textually based.• Isn't a sexual ethnographer studying texts? And doesn't a social historian collate evidence from texts? Sometimes the texts are oral histories, sometimes they might be interview material, sometimes they might be fiction or autobiography, but given our basic formulation of sex as "private," something that happens when other people are not around, there is no way to objectively observe "in the bed­ room." Conversely, readings of texts also require historical contexts and some relation to the lived experience of subjects. The text-based method­ ologies err on the side of abstraction, and the sociological studies err on the side of overly rationalizing sexual behavior. Finally, although some have criticized literary or cultural studies approaches to identity construc­ tion as apolitical or ahistorical, theories that tie the history of sexuality unproblematically to economics or the movement of capital tend to pro-

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duce exactly the linear narratives of rational progress and modernization that sexuality seems to resist. A queer methodology, in a way, is a scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human behavior. The queer methodology attempts to combine methods that are often cast as being at odds with each other, and it refuses the aca­ demic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence. Although this book will be immediately recognizable as a work of cultural studies, it will not shy away from the more empirical methods associated with ethnographic re­ search.

Constructing Masculinities

Within cultural studies itself, masculinity has recently become a favorite topic. I want to try here to account for the growing popularity of a body of work on masculinity that evinces absolutely no interest in masculinity without men. I first noticed the unprecedented interest in masculinity in April 1994 when the DIA Center for the Performing Arts convened a group of important intellectuals to hold forth on the topic of masculinities. On the opening night of this event, one commentator wondered, "Why masculinity, why now?" Several others, male critics and scholars, gave elo­ quent papers about their memories of being young boys and about their relationships with their fathers. The one lesbian on the panel, a poet, read a moving poem about rape. At the end of the evening, only one panelist had commented on the limitations of a discussion of masculinity that in­ terpreted "masculinity" as a synonym for men or maleness.9 This lonely intervention highlighted the gap between mainstream discussions of mas­ culinity and men and ongoing queer discussions about masculinity, which extend far beyond the male body. Indeed, in answer to the naive question that began the evening, "Why masculinities, why now?" one might state: Because masculinity in the 1990s has finally been recognized as, at least in part, a construction by female- as well as male-born people.10 The anthology that the conference produced provides more evidence of the thoroughgoing association that the editors have made between masculinity and maleness. The title page features a small photographic illustration of a store sign advertising clothing as "Fixings for Men." This

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illustration has been placed just below the title, Constructing Masculinity, and forces the reader to understand the construction of masculinity as the outfitting of males within culture. The introduction to the volume at­ tempts to diversify this definition of masculinity by using Judith Butler's and Eve Sedgwick's contributions to suggest that the anthology recognizes the challenges made by gays, lesbians, and queers to the terms of gender normativity. The editors insist that masculinity is multiple and that "far from just being about men, the idea of masculinity engages, inflects, and shapes everyone." 11 The commitment to the representation of masculinity as multiple is certainly borne out in the first essay in the volume, by Eve Sedgwick, in which she proposes that masculinity may have little to do with men, and is somewhat extended by Butler's essay "Melancholy Gen­ der." But Sedgwick also critiques the editors for having proposed a book and a conference on masculinity that remain committed to linking mascu­ linity to maleness. Although the introduction suggests that the editors have heeded Sedgwick's call for gender diversity, the rest of the volume suggests otherwise. There are many fascinating essays in this anthology, but there are no essays specifically on female masculinity. Although gender-queer images by Loren Cameron and Cathy Opie adorn the pages of the book, the text contains no discussions of these images. The book circles around discussions of male icons such as Clint Eastwood and Steven Seagal; it ad­ dresses the complex relations between fathers and sons; it examines topics such as how science defines men and masculinity and the law. The volume concludes with an essay by Stanley Aronowitz titled "My Masculinity," an autobiographically inflected consideration of various forms of male power. None of my analysis here is to say that this is an uninteresting anthology or that the essays are somehow wrong or misguided, but I am trying to point out that the editorial statement at the beginning of the volume is less a prologue to what follows and more of an epilogue that describes what a volume on masculinity should do as opposed to what the anthology does do. Even when the need for an analysis of female masculinity has been acknowledged, in other words, it seems remarkably difficult to fol­ low through on. What is it then that, to paraphrase Eve Sedgwick's essay, makes it so difficult not to presume an essential relation between mascu­ linity and men? 12 By beginning with this examination of the Constructing Masculinity con­ ference and anthology, I do not want to give the impression that the topic of female masculinities must always be related to some larger topic, some

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more general set of masculinities that has been, and continues to be, about men. Nor do I want to suggest that gender theory is the true origin of gender knowledges. Rather, this conference and book merely empha­ size the lag between community knowledges and practices and academic discourses.13 I believe it is both helpful and important to contextualize a discussion of female and lesbian masculinities in direct opposition to a more generalized discussion of masculinity within cultural studies that seems intent on insisting that masculinity remain the property of male bodies. The continued refusal in Western society to admit ambiguously gendered bodies into functional social relations {evidenced, for example, by our continued use of either/or bathrooms, either women or men) is, I will claim, sustained by a conservative and protectionist attitude by men in general toward masculinity. Such an attitude has been bolstered by a more general disbelief in female masculinity. I can only describe such disbelief in terms of a failure in a collective imagination: in other words, female-born people have been making convincing and powerful assaults on the coherence of male masculinity for well over a hundred years; what prevents these assaults from taking hold and accomplishing the diminu­ tion of the bonds between masculinity and men? Somehow, despite mul­ tiple images of strong women {such as bodybuilder Bev Francis or tennis player Martina Navratilova), of cross-identifying women (Radclyffe Hall or Ethel Smyth), of masculine-coded public figures (Janet Reno), of butch superstars (k. d. lang), of muscular and athletic women {Jackie Joyner­ Kersee), of female-born transgendered people {Leslie Feinberg), there is still no general acceptance or even recognition of masculine women and boyish girls. This book addresses itself to this collective failure to imagine and ratify the masculinity produced by, for, and within women. In case my concerns about the current discussions of masculinity in cultural studies sound too dismissive, I want to look in an extended way at what happens when academic discussions of male masculinity take place to the exclusion of discussions of more wide-ranging masculinities. While it may seem that I am giving an inordinate amount of attention to what is after all just one intervention into current discussions, I am using one book as representative of a whole slew of other studies of masculinity that replicate the intentions and the mistakes of this one. In an anthology called Boys: Masculinities in Contemporary Culture, edited by Paul Smith for a Cultural Studies series, Smith suggests that masculinity must always be thought of "in the plural" as masculinities "defined and cut through by dif-

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ferences and contradictions of all sorts." 1• The plurality of masculinities for Smith encompasses a dominant white masculinity that is crisscrossed by its others, gay, bisexual, black, Asian, and Latino masculinities. Although the recognition of a host of masculinities makes sense, Smith chooses to focus on dominant white masculinity to the exclusion of the other mascu­ linities he has listed. Smith, predictably, warns the reader not to fall into the trap of simply critiquing dominant masculinity or simply celebrat­ ing minority masculinities, and then he makes the following foundational statement:

And it may well be the case, as some influential voices often tell us, that masculinity or masculinities are in some real sense not the exclu­ sive "property" of biologically male subjects-it's true that many female subjects lay claim to masculinity as their property. Yet in terms of cul­ tural and political power, it still makes a difference when masculinity coincides with biological maleness. (4)

What is immediately noticeable to me here is the odd attribution of im­ mense power to those "influential voices" who keep telling us that mascu­ linity is not the property of men. There is no naming of these influential voices, and we are left supposing that "influence" has rendered the "female masculinity theorists" so powerful that names are irrelevant: these voices, one might suppose, are hegemonic. Smith goes on to plead with the reader, asking us to admit that the intersection of maleness and masculinity does "still" make a difference. His appeal here to common sense allows him to sound as if he is trying to reassert some kind of rationality to a debate that is spinning off into totally inconsequential discussions. Smith is really arguing that we must turn to dominant masculinity to begin deconstruct­ ing masculinity because it is the equation of maleness plus masculinity that adds up to social legitimacy. As I argued earlier in this chapter, however, precisely because white male masculinity has obscured all other mascu­ linities, we have to turn away from its construction to bring other more mobile forms of masculinity to light. Smith's purpose in his reassertion of the difference that male masculinity makes is to uncover the "cultural and political power" of this union in order to direct our attention to the power of patriarchy. The second part of the paragraph makes this all too clear:

Biological men-male-sexed beings-are after all, in varying degrees, the bearers of privilege and power within the systems against which

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women still struggle. The privilege and power are, of course, different for different men, endlessly diversified through the markers of class, nation, race, sexual preference and so on. But I'd deny that there are any men who are entirely outside of the ambit, let's say, of power and privi­ lege in relation to women. In that sense it has to be useful to our thinking to recall that masculinities are not only a function of dominant notions of masculinity and not constituted solely in resistant notions of "other" masculinities. In fact, masculinities exist inevitably in relation to what feminisms have construed as the system of patriarchy and patriarchal relations.15

The most noticeable feature of this paragraph is the remarkable sta­ bility of the terms "women" and "men." Smith advances here a slightly old-fashioned feminism that understands women as endlessly victimized within systems of male power. Woman, within such a model, is the name for those subjects within patriarchy who have no access to male power and who are regulated and confined by patriarchal structures. But what would Smith say to Monique Wittig's claim that lesbians are not women because they are not involved in the heterosexual matrix that produces sexual difference as a power relation? What can Smith add to Judith But­ ler's influential theory of "gender trouble," which suggests that "gender is a copy with no original" and that dominant sexualities and genders are in some sense imbued with a pathetic dependence on their others that puts them perpetually at risk? What would Smith say to Jacob Hale's claim that the genders we use as reference points in gender theory fall far be­ hind community productions of alternative genderings? 16 Are butch dykes women? Are male transvestites men? How does gender variance disrupt the flow of powers presumed by patriarchy in relations between men and women? Smith, in other words, cannot take female masculinity into ac­ count because he sees it as inconsequential and secondary to much more important questions about male privilege. Again, this sounds more like a plaintive assertion that men do still access male power within patriarchy (don't they?}, and it conveniently ignores the ways in which gender rela­ tions are scrambled where and when gender variance comes into play. Smith's attempt to shore up male masculinity by dismissing the im­ portance of other masculinities finds further expression in his attempt to take racialized masculinities into consideration. His introductory essay opens with a meditation on the complications of the O.J. Simpson case,

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and Smith wonders at the way popular discourse on the O.J. case sidesteps issues of masculinity and male domination in favor ofrace. When he hears a black male caller to a radio talk show link O.J.'s case to an ongoing con­ spiracy against black men in this country, Smith ponders: "His spluttering about the attempted genocide of black men reminded me, somehow, that another feature of the O.J. case was the way it had started with the prose­ cution trying to establish the relevance of O.J.'s record as a wife beater" (Smith, Boys, r). Noting that the callers to the talk show did not have much to say about this leads Smith to wonder whether race can consti­ tute a collective identity but masculinity cannot, and finally he suggests that although "it might be difficult to talk about race in this country, it is even more difficult to talk about masculinity" (1). If you are a white man, it is probably extremely difficult to talk about either race or masculinity let alone both at the same time. But, of course, race and masculinity, espe­ cially in the case of 0. J., are not separable into tidy categories. Indeed, one might say that the caller's "spluttering" about conspiracies against black men constituted a far more credible race analysis in this case than Smith's articulation of the relations between race and masculinity. For Smith, mas­ culinity in the case of O.J. constitutes a flow of domination that comes up against his blackness as a flow of subordination. There is no discussion here of the injustices of the legal system, the role of class and money in the trial, or the complicated history of relations between black men and white women. Smith uses O.J. as shorthand for a model that is supposed to suggest power and disempowerment in the same location. I am taking so much time and effort to discount Smith's introduction to Boys because there is a casualness to his essay that both indicates his lack of any real investment in the project of alternative masculinities and suggests an unwillingness to think through the messy identifications that make up contemporary power relations around gender, race, and class. The book that Smith introduces also proves to have nothing much to offer to new discussions of masculinity, and we quickly find ourselves, from the opening essay on, in the familiar territory of men, boys, and their fathers. The first essay, for example, by Fred Pfeil, "A Buffalo, New York Story," tells a pitiful tale about father-son relations in the 1950s. In one memo­ rable moment from the memoir, he (Fred) and Dad have cozied up on the couch to watch Bonanza while Mom and Sis are doing the dishes in the kitchen. Boy asks Dad "why bad guys were always so stupid," and Dad laughs and explains "because they were bad" (ro). The story goes on to de-

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tail the innocent young boy's first brushes with his male relatives' racism and his own painful struggle with car sickness. Besides taking apart the dynamics of fathers and sons cozying up together to watch Bonanza, there most certainly are a multitude of important things to say about men and masculinity in patriarchy, but Smith and some of his contributors choose not to say them. We could be producing ethnographies on the aggres­ sive and indeed protofascist masculinities produced by male sports fans.17 Much work still remains to be done on the socialization (or lack thereof) of young men in high schools, on (particularly rich white male) domestic abusers, on the new sexism embodied by "sensitive men," on the men who participate in the traffic in mail-order brides and sex tourism (including a study of privileged white gay masculinity). But studies in male mascu­ linity are predictably not so interested in taking apart the patriarchal bonds between white maleness and privilege; they are much more concerned to detail the fragilities of male socialization, the pains of manhood, and the fear of female empowerment.18 Because I have criticized Smith for his apparent lack of investment in the project of producing alternative masculinities, let me take a moment to make my own investments clear. Although I make my own masculinity the topic of my last chapter, it seems important to state that this book is an attempt to make my own female masculinity plausible, credible, and real. For a large part of my life, I have been stigmatized by a masculinity that marked me as ambiguous and illegible. Like many other tomboys, I was mistaken for a boy throughout my childhood, and like many other tom­ boy adolescents, I was forced into some semblance of femininity for my teenage years. When gender-ambiguous children are constantly challenged about their gender identity, the chain of misrecognitions can actually pro­ duce a new recognition: in other words, to be constantly mistaken for a boy, for many tomboys, can contribute to the production of a masculine identity. It was not until my midtwenties that I finally found a word for my particular gender configuration: butch. In my final chapter, "Raging Bull (Dyke)," I address the ways in which butches manage to affirm their mas­ culinity despite the multiple sites in which that masculinity is challenged, denied, threatened, and violated.

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The Bathroom Problem

If three decades of feminist theorizing about gender has thoroughly dis­ lodged the notion that anatomy is destiny, that gender is natural, and that male and female are the only options, why do we still operate in a world that assumes that people who are not male are female, and people who are not female are male (and even that people who are not male are not people!). If gender has been so thoroughly defamiliarized, in other words, why do we not have multiple gender options, multiple gender categories, and real-life nonmale and nonfemale options for embodiment and identi­ fication? In a way, gender's very flexibility and seeming fluidity is precisely what allows dimorphic gender to hold sway. Because so few people actually match any given community standards for male or female, in other words, gender can be imprecise and therefore multiply relayed through a solidly binary system. At the same time, because the definitional boundaries of male and female are so elastic, there are very few people in any given pub­ lic space who are completely unreadable in terms of their gender. Ambiguous gender, when and where it does appear, is inevitably trans­ formed into deviance, thirdness, or a blurred version of either male or female. As an example, in public bathrooms for women, various bathroom users tend to fail to measure up to expectations of femininity, and those of us who present in some ambiguous way are routinely questioned and challenged about our presence in the "wrong" bathroom. For example, re­ cently, on my way to give a talk in Minneapolis, I was making a connection at Chicago's O'Hare airport. I strode purposefully into the women's bath­ room. No sooner had I entered the stall than someone was knocking at the door: "Open up, security here!" I understood immediately what had happened. I had, once again, been mistaken for a man or a boy, and some woman had called security. As soon as I spoke, the two guards at the bath­ room stall realized their error, mumbled apologies, and took off. On the way home from the same trip, in the Denver airport, the same sequence of events was repeated. Needless to say, the policing of gender within the bathroom is intensified in the space of the airport, where people are liter­ ally moving through space and time in ways that cause them to want to stabilize some boundaries (gender) even as they traverse others (national). However, having one's gender challenged in the women's rest room is a fre­ quent occurrence in the lives of many androgynous or masculine women;

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indeed, it is so frequent that one wonders whether the category "woman," when used to designate public functions, is completely outmoded.19 It is no accident, then, that travel hubs become zones of intense scrutiny and observation. But gender policing within airport bathrooms is merely an intensified version of a larger "bathroom problem." For some gender­ ambiguous women, it is relatively easy to "prove" their right to use the women's bathroom-they can reveal some decisive gender trait (a high voice, breasts), and the challenger will generally back off. For others (pos­ sibly low-voiced or hairy or breastless people), it is quite difficult to justify their presence in the women's bathroom, and these people may tend to use the men's bathroom, where scrutiny is far less intense. Obviously, in these bathroom confrontations, the gender-ambiguous person first appears as not-woman ("You are in the wrong bathroom!"), but then the person ap­ pears as something actually even more scary, not-man ("No, I am not," spoken in a voice recognized as not-male). Not-man and not-woman, the gender-ambiguous bathroom user is also not androgynous or in-between; this person is gender deviant. For many gender deviants, the notion of passing is singularly unhelp­ ful. Passing as a narrative assumes that there is a self that masquerades as another kind of self and does so successfully; at various moments, the successful pass may cohere into something akin to identity. At such a mo­ ment, the passer has become. What of a biological female who presents as butch, passes as male in some circumstances and reads as butch in others, and considers herself not to be a woman but maintains distance from the category "man"? For such a subject, identity might best be described as process with multiple sites for becoming and being. To understand such a process, we would need to do more than map psychic and physical jour­ neys between male and female and within queer and straight space; we would need, in fact, to think in fractal terms and about gender geometries. Furthermore, I argue in chapter 4, in my discussion of the stone butch, when and where we discuss the sexualities at stake in certain gender defi­ nitions, very different identifications between sexuality, gender, and the body emerge. The stone butch, for example, in her self-definition as a non­ feminine, sexually untouchable female, complicates the idea that lesbians share female sexual practices or women share female sexual desires or even that masculine women share a sense of what animates their particu­ lar masculinities.

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I want to focus on what I am calling "the bathroom problem" because I believe it illustrates in remarkably clear ways the flourishing existence of gender binarism despite rumors of its demise. Furthermore, many norma­ tively gendered women have no idea that a bathroom problem even exists and claim to be completely ignorant about the trials and tribulations that face the butch woman who needs to use a public bathroom. But queer lit­ erature is littered with references to the bathroom problem, and it would not be an exaggeration to call it a standard feature of the butch narrative. For example, Leslie Feinberg provides clear illustrations of the dimensions of the bathroom problem in Stone Butch Blues. In this narrative of the life of the he-she factory worker, Jess Goldberg, Jess recounts many occasions in which she has to make crucial decisions about whether she can afford to use the women's bathroom. On a shopping outing with some drag queens, Jess tells Peaches: "I gotta use the bathroom. God, I wish I could wait, but I can't." Jess takes a deep breath and enters the ladies room:

Two women were freshening their makeup in front of the mirror. One glanced at the other and finished applying her lipstick. "Is that a man or a woman?" She said to her friend as I passed them. The other woman turned to me. "This is the woman's bathroom," she informed me. I nodded. "I know." I locked the stall door behind me. Their laughter cut me to the bone. "You don't really know if that is a man or not," one woman said to the other. "We should call security to make sure." I flushed the toilet and fumbled with my zipper in fear. Maybe it was just an idle threat. Maybe they really would call security. I hurried out of the bathroom as soon as I heard both women leave.2°

For Jess, the bathroom represents a limit to her ability to move around in the public sphere. Her body, with its needs and physical functions, imposes a limit on her attempts to function normally despite her variant gender presentation. The women in the rest room, furthermore, are depicted as spiteful, rather than fearful. They toy with Jess by calling into question her right to use the rest room and threatening to call the police. As Jess puts it: "They never would have made fun of a guy like that." In other words, if the women were truly anxious for their safety, they would not have toyed with the intruder, and they would not have hesitated to call the police. Their

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casualness about calling security indicates that they know Jess is a woman but want to punish her for her inappropriate self-presentation. Another chronicle of butch life, Throw It to the River, by Nice Rodriguez, a Filipina-Canadian writer, also tells of the bathroom encounter. In a story called "Every Full Moon," Rodriguez tells a romantic tale about a butch bus conductor called Remedios who falls in love with a former nun called Julianita. Remedios is "muscular around the arms and shoulders," and her "toughness allows her to bully anyone who will not pay the fare." 21 She ag­ gressively flirts with Julianita until Julianita agrees to go to a movie with Remedios. To prepare for her date, Remedios dresses herself up, carefully flattening out her chest with Band-Aids over the nipples: "She bought a white shirt in Divisoria just for this date. Now she worries that the cloth may be too thin and transparent, and that Julianita will be turned off when her nipples protrude out like dice" (33). With her "well-ironed jeans," her smooth chest, and even a man's manicure, Remedios heads out for her date. However, once out with Julianita, Remedios, now dressed in her butch best, has to be careful about public spaces. After the movie, Julianita rushes off to the washroom, but Remedios waits outside for her:

She has a strange fear of ladies rooms. She wishes there was another washroom somewhere between the mens' and the ladies' for queers like her. Most of the time she holds her pee-sometimes as long as half a day-until she finds a washroom where the users are familiar with her. Strangers take to her unkindly, especially elder women who inspect her from head to toe. (40-41)

Another time, Remedios tells of being chased from a ladies' room and beaten by a bouncer. The bathroom problem for Remedios and for Jess severely limits their ability to circulate in public spaces and actually brings them into contact with physical violence as a result of having violated a cardinal rule of gender: one must be readable at a glance. After Reme­ dios is beaten for having entered a ladies' room, her father tells her to be more careful, and Rodriguez notes: "She realized that being cautious means swaying her hips and parading her boobs when she enters any ladies room" (30). If we use the paradigm of the bathroom as a limit of gender identifi­ cation, we can measure the distance between binary gender schema and lived multiple gendered experiences. The accusation "you're in the wrong

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bathroom" really says two different things. First, it announces that your gender seems at odds with your sex (your apparent masculinity or an­ drogyny is at odds with your supposed femaleness); second, it suggests that single-gender bathrooms are only for those who fit clearly into one category (male) or the other (female). Either we need open-access bath­ rooms or multigendered bathrooms, or we need wider parameters for gender identification. The bathroom, as we know it, actually represents the crumbling edifice of gender in the twentieth century. The frequency with which gender-deviant "women" are mistaken for men in public bath­ rooms suggests that a large number of feminine women spend a large amount of time and energy policing masculine women. Something very different happens, of course, in the men's public toilet, where the space is more likely to become a sexual cruising zone than a site for gender repres­ sion. Lee Edelman, in an essay about the interpenetration of nationalism and sexuality, argues that "the institutional men's room constitutes a site at which the zones of public and private cross with a distinctive psychic charge." 22 The men's room, in other words, constitutes both an architec­ ture of surveillance and an incitement to desire, a space of homosocial interaction and of homoerotic interaction. So, whereas men's rest rooms tend to operate as a highly charged sexual space in which sexual interactions are both encouraged and punished, women's rest rooms tend to operate as an arena for the enforcement of gen­ der conformity. Sex-segregated bathrooms continue to be necessary to pro­ tect women from male predations but also produce and extend a rather out­ dated notion of a public-private split between male and female society. The bathroom is a domestic space beyond the home that comes to represent do­ mestic order, or a parody of it, out in the world. The women's bathroom ac­ cordingly becomes a sanctuary of enhanced femininity, a "little girl's room" to which one retreats to powder one's nose or fix one's hair. The men's bathroom signifies as the extension of the public nature of masculinity-it is precisely not domestic even though the names given to the sexual func­ tion of the bathroom-such as cottage or tearoom-suggest it is a parody of the domestic. The codes that dominate within the women's bathroom are primarily gender codes; in the men's room, they are sexual codes. Pub­ lic sex versus private gender, openly sexual versus discreetly repressive, bathrooms beyond the home take on the proportions of a gender factory. Marjorie Garber comments on the liminality of the bathroom in Vested Interests in a chapter on the perils and privileges of cross-dressing. She

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discusses the very different modes of passing and cross-dressing for cross­ identified genetic males and females, and she observes that the restroom is a "potential waterloo" for both female-to-male (FTM) and male-to-female (MTF) cross-dressers and transsexuals.23 For the FTM, the men's room represents the most severe test of his ability to pass, and advice frequently circulates within FTM communities about how to go unnoticed in male­ only spaces. Garber notes: "The cultural paranoia of being caught in the ultimately wrong place, which may be inseparable from the pleasure of "passing" in that same place, depends in part on the same cultural bi­ narism, the idea that gender categories are sufficiently uncomplicated to permit self-assortment into one of the two 'rooms' without deconstructive reading" (47). It is worth pointing out here (if only because Garber does not) that the perils for passing FTMS in the men's room are very different from the perils of passing MTFS in the women's room. On the one hand, the FTM in the men's room is likely to be less scrutinized because men are not quite as vigilant about intruders as women for obvious reasons. On the other hand, if caught, the FTM may face some version of gender panic from the man who discovers him, and it is quite reasonable to expect and fear violence in the wake of such a discovery. The MTF, by comparison, will be more scrutinized in the women's room but possibly less open to pun­ ishment if caught. Because the FTM ventures into male territory with the potential threat of violence hanging over his head, it is crucial to recognize that the bathroom problem is much more than a glitch in the machinery of gender segregation and is better described in terms of the violent en­ forcement of our current gender system. Garber's reading of the perilous use of rest rooms by both FTMS and MTFS develops out of her introductory discussion of what Lacan calls "uri­ nary segregation." Lacan used the term to describe the relations between identities and signifiers, and he ultimately used the simple diagram of the rest room signs "Ladies" and "Gentlemen" to show that within the produc­ tion of sexual difference, primacy is granted to the signifier over that which it signifies; in more simple terms, naming confers, rather than reflects, meaning.24 In the same way, the system of urinary segregation creates the very functionality of the categories "men" and "women." Although rest­ room signs seem to serve and ratify distinctions that already exist, in actual fact these markers produce identifications within these constructed cate­ gories. Garber latches on to the notion of "urinary segregation" because it helps her to describe the processes of cultural binarism within the produc-

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tion of gender; for Garber, transvestites and transsexuals challenge this system by resisting the literal translation of the signs "Ladies" and "Gentle­ men." Garber uses the figures of the transvestite and the transsexual to show the obvious flaws and gaps in a binary gender system; the trans­ vestite, as interloper, creates a third space of possibility within which all bi­ naries become unstable. Unfortunately, as in all attempts to break a binary by producing a third term, Garber's third space tends to stabilize the other two. In "Tearooms and Sympathy," Lee Edelman also turns to Lacan's term "urinary segregation," but Edelman uses Lacan's diagram to mark hetero­ sexual anxiety "about the potential inscriptions of homosexual desire and about the possibility of knowing or recognizing whatever might constitute 'homosexual difference"' (160). Whereas for Garber it is the transvestite who marks the instability of the markers "Ladies" and "Gentlemen," for Edelman it is not the passing transvestite but the passing homosexual. Both Garber and Edelman, interestingly enough, seem to fix on the men's room as the site of these various destabilizing performances. As I am arguing here, however, focusing exclusively on the drama of the men's room avoids the much more complicated theater of the women's room. Garber writes of urinary segregation: "For transvestites and transsexuals, the 'men's room' problem is really a challenge to the way in which such cul­ tural binarism is read" (14). She goes on to list some cinematic examples of the perils of urinary segregation and discusses scenes from Tootsie (1982), Cabaret (1972), and the Female Impersonator Pageant (1975). Garber's ex­ amples are odd illustrations of what she calls "the men's room problem" if only because at least one of her examples (Tootsie) demonstrates gender policing in the women's room. Also, Garber makes it sound as if vigor­ ous gender policing happens in the men's room while the women's room is more of a benign zone for gender enforcement. She notes: "In fact, the urinal has appeared in a number of fairly recent films as a marker of the ultimate 'difference' -or studied indifference" (14). Obviously, Garber is drawing a parallel here between the conventions of gender attribution within which the penis marks the "ultimate difference"; however, by not moving beyond this remarkably predictable description of gender differen­ tiation, Garber overlooks the main distinction between gender policing in the men's room and in the women's room. Namely, in the women's room, it is not only the MTF but all gender-ambiguous females who are scrutinized, whereas in the men's room, biological men are rarely deemed out of place. Garber's insistence that there is "a third space of possibility" occupied by

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the transvestite has closed down the possibility that there may be a fourth, fifth, sixth, or one hundredth space beyond the binary. The "women's room problem" (as opposed to the "men's room problem") indicates a multiplicity of gender displays even within the supposedly stable category of "woman." So what gender are the hundreds of female-born people who are con­ sistently not read as female in the women's room? And because so many women clearly fail the women's room test, why have we not begun to count and name the genders that are clearly emerging at this time? One could answer this question in two ways: On the one hand, we do not name and notice new genders because as a society we are committed to maintain­ ing a binary gender system. On the other hand, we could also say that the failure of "male" and "female" to exhaust the field of gender variation actu­ ally ensures the continued dominance of these terms. Precisely because virtually nobody fits the definitions of male and female, the categories gain power and currency from their impossibility. In other words, the very flexibility and elasticity of the terms "man" and "woman" ensures their longevity. To test this proposition, look around any public space and notice how few people present formulaic versions of gender and yet how few are unreadable or totally ambiguous. The "It's Pat" character on a Saturday Night Live skit dramatized the ways in which people insist on attributing gender in terms of male or female on even the most undecidable charac­ ters. The "It's Pat" character produced laughs by consistently sidestepping gender fixity-Pat's partner had a neutral name, and everything Pat did or said was designed to be read either way. Of course, the enigma that Pat represented could have been solved very easily; Pat's coworkers could simply have asked Pat what gender sfhe was or preferred. This project on female masculinity is designed to produce more than two answers to that question and even to argue for a concept of "gender preference" as op­ posed to compulsory gender binarism. The human potential for incredibly precise classifications has been demonstrated in multiple arenas; why then do we settle for a paucity of classifications when it comes to gender? A system of gender preferences would allow for gender neutrality until such a time when the child or young adult announces his or her or its gender. Even if we could not let go of a binary gender system, there are still ways to make gender optional-people could come out as a gender in the way they come out as a sexuality. The point here is that there are many ways to depathologize gender variance and to account for the multiple genders that we already produce and sustain. Finally, as I suggested in relation to

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Garber's arguments about transvestism, "thirdness" merely balances the binary system and, furthermore, tends to homogenize many different gen­ der variations under the banner of "other." It is remarkably easy in this society not to look like a woman. It is rela­ tively difficult, by comparison, not to look like a man: the threats faced by men who do not gender conform are somewhat different than for women. Unless men are consciously trying to look like women, men are less likely than women to fail to pass in the rest room. So one question posed by the bathroom problem asks, what makes femininity so approximate and mas­ culinity so precise? Or to pose the question with a different spin, why is femininity easily impersonated or performed while masculinity seems re­ silient to imitation? Of course, this formulation does not easily hold and indeed quickly collapses into the exact opposite: why is it, in the case of the masculine woman in the bathroom, for example, that one finds the limits of femininity so quickly, whereas the limits of masculinity in the men's room seem fairly expansive? We might tackle these questions by thinking about the effects, social and cultural, of reversed gender typing. In other words, what are the implica­ tions of male femininity and female masculinity? One might imagine that even a hint offemininity sullies or lowers the social value of maleness while all masculine forms of femaleness should result in an elevation of status.25 My bathroom example alone proves that this is far from true. Further­ more, if we think of popular examples of approved female masculinity like a buffed Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 (1991) or a lean and mean Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, it is not hard to see that what renders these performances of female masculinity quite tame is their resolute hetero­ sexuality. Indeed, in Alien Resurrection (1997), Sigourney Weaver combines her hard body with some light flirtation with co-star Winona Ryder and her masculinity immediately becomes far more threatening and indeed "alien." In other words, when and where female masculinity conjoins with possibly queer identities, it is far less likely to meet with approval. Because female masculinity seems to be at its most threatening when coupled with lesbian desire, in this book I concentrate on queer female mascu­ linity almost to the exclusion of heterosexual female masculinity. I have no doubt that heterosexual female masculinity menaces gender conformity in its own way, but all too often it represents an acceptable degree of female masculinity as compared to the excessive masculinity of the dyke. It is im­ portant when thinking about gender variations such as male femininity

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and female masculinity not simply to create another binary in which mas­ culinity always signifies power; in alternative models of gender variation, female masculinity is not simply the opposite offemale femininity, nor is it a female version of male masculinity. Rather, as we shall see in some of the artwork and gender performances to follow, very often the unholy union of femaleness and masculinity can produce wildly unpredictable results.

Minority Masculinities and the Art of Gender

Minority masculinities and femininities destabilize binary gender sys­ tems in many different locations. As many feminist and antiracist critics have commented, femininity and masculinity signify as normative within and through white middle-class heterosexual bodies.26 Films by artists of color that disrupt this representational code-such as Looking for Langs­ ton (1988), by Isaac Julien, and Tongues Untied (1989), by Marlon Riggs, for example-can undo the hierarchized relations between dominant and minority sexualites, but they also have the power to reorganize mascu­ linity itself. In a recent popular example of the emergence of a minority masculinity within the scopic regime of racialization, we can witness the intersection of stereotyping and counterappropriation at work. In Set It Off, a film about four black women who go on a crime spree in response to overwhelming social injustice and personal outrage, rapper Queen Latifah plays what we might call "a butch in the hood." Latifah's character, Cleo­ patra Simms (Cleo), is a loudmouthed, bullying, tough, criminal butch with a cute girlfriend and a roughneck demeanor. Cleo's depiction of black female masculinity plays into stereotypical conceptions of black women as less feminine than some mythic norm of white femininity, but it also completely rearranges the terms of the stereotype. If blackness in general is associated with excessive and indeed violent masculinity in the social imaginary, then Latifah as Cleo exploits this association with some suc­ cess. Latifah, a rapper herself, draws from the hyper-masculine moves of black male rappers to round out her character, and she powerfully makes visible what is both attractive and dangerous about a "boyz in the hood"

masculine performance.2' Other assaults on dominant gender regimes come from queer butch art and performance, which might include drag king shows, butch theatrical roles, or art featuring gender-variant subjects. For example, as we shall see in chapter 7, in terms of drag king performances, stars such as Elvis Her-

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Figure 2. Butch in the hood. Queen Latifah as Cleo in Set It Off (1997), directed by F. Gary Gray.

selvis or Mo B. Dick tum dominant masculinity around by parodying male superstardom and working conventional modes of performed sexism and misogyny into successful comedy routines. As Mo B. Dick, for example, drag king Maureen Fischer manages to parody masculinity by performing its most unnatural and obviously staged aspect: sexism. Declaiming his heterosexuality and fear of "homos" and desire for "girlies" to audiences in the drag clubs, Mo B. Dick reeks of the tricks of misogyny. Mo B.'s manipulations of a stagy and theatrical masculinity draw attention to not simply the performative aspect of masculinity but also the places where nonperformativity has ideological implications. In other words, by expos­ ing smarmy male attentions to femaleness as staged, the drag king refuses any construction of misogyny as the natural order of things. In a slightly different kind of butch theater, a queer performance art piece called "You're Just Like My Father," by Peggy Shaw (1995), Shaw represents female masculinity as a pugnacious and gritty staging of the reorganization of family dynamics via the butch daughter. There is no question here that Shaw's masculinity is part and parcel of her lesbianism rather than a drag identity or an imitation of maleness. Shaw becomes

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/674300/9781478002703-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Figure 3. "Stepping Out of the Closet." Drag king Mo B. Dick, photo by Del Grace (New York, 1997). Photo courtesy of the artist.

Figure 4. "You're Just Like My Father." Peggy Shaw's publicity poster (1995).

moruro """'who,e I I~•'""" ~ 1 ' 1imin~, Jiff ~i;~ AUGUST 16,SEPTEMBER 3 WED,,SUN, 8PM $1 2 JOSIE'S CABARET & JUICE JOINT

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Figure 5. "lngin," from the series "Being and Having," by Catherine Opie (1991). Photo courtesy of Jay Gorney Modern Art, New York and Regen Projects.

her mother's substitute husband and her lovers' substitute fathers and brothers, and she constructs her own masculinity by reworking and im­ proving the masculinities she observes all around her. Shaw moves easily back and forth between various personae: she is the fighter, the crooner, the soldier, the breadwinner, the romeo, the patriarch. In each of these roles, she makes it clear that she is a female-bodied person inhabiting each role and that each role is part of her gender identity. To play among a variety of masculine identifications, furthermore, Shaw is not forced to become her father or to appropriate his maleness; she is already "just like" her father, and their masculinities exist on parallel plains. The fleshing out of female masculinities has not been limited to cine­ matic or theatrical arenas. In the photographic work of artists such as Catherine Opie and Del Grace, we can watch the female body becoming masculine in stunning and powerful ways. Catherine Opie's lush photo­ graphic portraits of members of dyke, transgender, and S-M communities put a particular version of female masculinity on display. In one of her

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Figure 6. "Whitey," from the series " Being and Having," by Catherine Opie (1991). Photo courtesy of Jay Gorney Modern Art, New York and Regen Projects.

early projects, entitled "Being and Having," Opie created a set of framed portraits of mustachioed or bearded faces against startling yellow back­ drops. In each shot, the camera moves up close to the model's face (often even chopping off the top of the head) and brings the spectator right up against a face that, despite the proximity, remains oddly unreadable. The close-up articulates what feels like an intimacy between the model and the artist, an intimacy, moreover, not available to the viewer. The person looking at the photograph is positioned simultaneously as voyeur, as mir­ ror image, and as participant, but ultimately it is the spectator who feels caught between looks, between being and having. Very often the camera comes close enough to the model's face to reveal the theatricality of the facial hair; in other portraits, the facial hair appears to be real, and this sets up a visual trap in which the viewer might attempt to determine whether she or he is looking at a male or a female face. This is a trap because Opie's images are often quite beyond the binary of gender, and each portrait adds a new gender dimension not assimilable within the

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Figure 7. "Mike and Sky, " by Catherine Opie (1993) . Photo courtesy of Jay Gorney Modern Art, New York and Regen Projects.

boundaries of "man" or "woman." In many of the commentaries on Opie's work, however, a critic will suggest that the complexity of Opie's work relies on the "operations that almost unconsciously take place when we de­ termine whether we are looking at a man or a woman." 28 However, when we look at Opie's work within a larger context of productions of female masculinity, the ambiguity of gender seems beside the point. Indeed, these portraits are not ambiguous-they are resolute images of female mascu­ linity in which, as Opie puts it, her cross-dressing models take their perfor-

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mances "both into the bedroom and out to public spaces. They are, I sup­ pose, exhibitionists, and their scene has become a public spectator sport." 29 Opie's images of bearded, pierced, and tattooed dykes and transgender men create a powerful visual aesthetic for alternative and minority mascu­ linities. Although Opie's work is often compared to that of Diane Arbus because she takes as her subject so-called misfits and freaks, Opie vigor­ ously denies such a comparison. She says: "I try to present people with an extreme amount of dignity. I mean, they're always going to be stared at, but I try to make the portraits stare back. That's what the relationship is all about. I mean, it's not like Diane Arbus or anything like that. Some of the portraits look very sad, I think they have this distant gaze but they are never pathetic."'0 Opie's insistence that her portraits "stare back" cre­ ates an interesting power dynamic between both photographer and model, but also between image and spectator. The power of the gaze in an Opie portrait always and literally rests with the image: the perpetual stare chal­ lenges the spectator's own sense of gender congruity, and even self, and it does indeed replicate with a difference the hostile stares that the model probably faces every day in the street. One reviewer of Opie's 1994 show, Portraits, commented that the isolation of each subject within the stylized frame of the photograph, with its brilliant color backdrops, transformed them into "abstract signs" and leaves the spectator free to be a voyeur.31 But such an assessment shies away from the disorienting effect of these portraits-the subjects are positively regal in their opulent settings, and their colorful displays of tattoos and body markings seem to single them out for photographic glory. The stare of the spectator is forced to be admir­ ing and appreciative rather than simply objectifying and voyeuristic. The tattoos and piercings and body modifications that mark the Opie model become in her portraits far more than the signifiers of some outlaw status. Whether we are confronted with the hormonally and surgically altered bodies of transgender men or the tattooed and pierced and scarred skin of the butch dyke, we look at bodies that display their own layered and mul­ tiple identifications. Del Grace's images of gender-ambiguous bodies are also stylized por­ traits in the Mapplethorpe tradition. However, in Grace's photographs, there is often some activity that defines gender ambiguity in relation to a set of sexual practices. Grace's photos often feature two or more bodies in play, and we see gender in these photographs as a complex set of negotia-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/674300/9781478002703-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Figure 8. "Jack's Back II ," by Del Grace (1994). Photo courtesy of the artist.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/674300/9781478002703-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Figure 9. "Jackie 11, " by Del Grace (1994). Photo courtesy of the artist.

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tions between bodies, identities, and desire. In "Triad" (1992) three shaven and bald female bodies are intertwined in a three-way embrace. The pal­ lor of the bodies and the smoothness of their shaven skin creates a hard, marble effect and turns skin into stone, refusing the traditional softness of femininity. Grace often gives her subjects an almost mythical treatment and, as in the Opie portraits, always grants her models dignity, power, and beauty even as she exposes them to the gaze. In her photographs of butch bodies, Grace borrows from gay male erotic imagery to construct a con­ text for an unselfconscious female masculinity. In "Jack's Back II" (1994) we see a sailor with his back toward us. The sailor wears white navy-issue pants and a white cap and has a hand tucked into his waistband. The back of the head is closely shaven and the shoulders are broad and manly. This image could be plucked from Paul Cadmus or Fassbinder's Querelle or any other classic example of gay homoerotica. However, within Grace's opus, one recognizes the back as belonging to Jackie, a beautifully built and tightly muscled butch whom Grace photographs repeatedly. In "Jackie II" we see Jackie, now from the front, wearing khaki pants and pulling an army T-shirt up over her head. While Jackie's face is still partially obscured in this image, her torso (Jack's front) is exposed, and while the breasts are just pronounced enough to mark Jackie as a "woman," they are small and muscular enough to keep her ambiguity intact. Catherine Opie also uses back shots to make gender unreadable. In "Dyke" (1994), we see a torso set against an elaborate backdrop. The word dyke is tattooed in gothic script just below the neckline of a head of very short hair. On the one hand, the inscription dispels any of the gender ambiguity by rendering the body lesbian, but on the other hand, given the many multigendered images of dykes that Opie has produced, the word dyke gives very few clues as to what the front of this body might look like. Opie's and Grace's "back art" are refusals to engage with the all too easy game of gender ambiguity. The artists literally want gender to be a surface for inscriptions, words and drawings, art and desire. In another back shot, "Self-Portrait" (1993), Opie exposes her own back with a cutting etched into her skin. The childlike image of two stick figures in skirts holding hands below a bubble cloud and in front of a stick house is profoundly unsentimental in this location. The drawing is obviously done in blood; it scars the skin and sits in almost uncomfortable proximity to one of Opie's arm tattoos. This back shot makes the back into a canvas and actually de­ fuses any of the curiosity that the viewer might have had about the front of

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/674300/9781478002703-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Figure 10. "Dyke," by Catherine Opie (1992) . Photo courtesy of Jay Gorney Modern Art, New York and Regen Projects.

Figure 11. "Self-Portrait," by Catherine Opie (1993) . Photo courtesy of Jay Gorney Modern Art, New York and Regen Projects.

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the body. As Opie notes about this self-portrait: "It says a lot of different things. One of them is that I have my back to you." 12 Whereas so many of Opie's photographs literally return the gaze with piercing stares, the back shots circumvent the question of the gaze altogether. Where the gaze is not engaged (from behind), a space seems to open up for gender variation and for different inscriptions of the sexed body. Opie's cuttings and the tattoos and scars on the bodies of both Opie's and Grace's models stand in direct opposition to another popular image of gender bending. The painted body of Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair in August 1992 was considered innovative and challenging when it appeared. Moore wore a painted man's suit on the cover, and inside the magazine were pictures of her in the painted suit leaning over the body of a sleeping man, her husband, Bruce Willis. The juxtaposition of Moore's painted body with the gender art of Opie and Grace reminds us of how fiercely heterosexual and gender-invariant popular culture tends to be. Moore's body suit fails to suggest even a mild representation of female masculinity precisely because it so anxiously emphasizes the femaleness of Moore's body. Whereas Opie's and Grace's portraits often make no effort to make femaleness visible, the Moore images represent femaleness as that which confers femininity on even the most conventional of masculine fa­ cades (the suit). The female masculinity in the work of Opie and Grace, by comparison, offers a glimpse into worlds where alternative masculinities make an art of gender. Del Grace's work on drag kings and trans-butches and Cathy Opie's por­ traits of male transsexuals highlight another boundary for gender variance: the transsexual body. In chapter 5, I examine the often permeable bound­ aries between butch women and transsexual men, and I attempt to track the various masculinities produced across these two groups. The boundary between transsexuals and butches becomes important as we try to delin­ eate the differences between being butch and becoming male, becoming transsexual and becoming male; at stake in this discussion is the project of alternative masculinities itself. Not all transsexualities, obviously, present a challenge (or want to) to hegemonic masculinity, and not all butch mascu­ linities produce subversion. However, transsexuality and transgenderism do afford unique opportunities to track explicit performances of nondomi­ nant masculinity.33 In this introduction, I have tried to chart the implications of the sup­ pression of female masculinities in a variety of spheres: in relation to cul-

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tural studies discussions, the suppression of female masculinities allows for male masculinity to stand unchallenged as the bearer of gender sta­ bility and gender deviance. The tomboy, the masculine woman, and the racialized masculine subject, I argue, all contribute to a mounting cultural indifference to the masculinity of white males. Gender policing in public bathrooms, furthermore, and gender performances within public spaces produce radically reconfigured notions of proper gender and map new genders onto a utopian vision of radically different bodies and sexualities. By arguing for gender transitivity, for self-conscious forms of female mas­ culinity, for indifference to dominant male masculinities, and for "nonce taxonomies," I do not wish to suggest that we can magically wish into being a new set of properly descriptive genders that would bear down on the outmoded categories "male" and "female." Nor do I mean to suggest that change is simple and that, for example, by simply creating the deseg­ regation of public toilets we will change the function of dominant genders within heteropatriarchal cultures. However, it seems to me that there are some very obvious spaces in which gender difference simply does not work right now, and the breakdown of gender as a signifying system in these arenas can be exploited to hasten the proliferation of alternate gender regimes in other locations. From drag kings to spies with gadgets, from butch bodies to FTM bodies, gender and sexuality and their technologies are already excessively strange. It is simply a matter of keeping them that way.

This book is divided into chapters that proceed not according to a chro­ nology of female masculinity but more within a logic of embodiment. While this introductory chapter has veered between discussions of the most obvious forms of female masculinity (such as tomboyism and butch­ ness) and considerations of methodologies, it has also attempted to convey the urgency of a full consideration of the topic of female masculinity. In the next chapter, I suggest that the project of historicizing female mascu­ linity must evolve by using the inconsistencies that dominate contempo­ rary discussions of gender to temper the kinds of claims we are willing to make about gendered subjectivities from other eras. Using a method that I call "perverse presentism," I try to produce a strategy for deciphering some examples of nineteenth-century female masculinity, and I focus on the "tribade." Turning next to the "invert," in chapter 3, I take my queer methodology into the twentieth century, and I examine the historical con­ text that produced The Well of Loneliness. Radclyffe Hall, I suggest, was

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neither unique in her masculinity nor stranded in a "well of loneliness" because of her gender inversion. I examine Havelock Ellis's case histories and newspaper stories about Hall's contemporaries to show that Hall was surrounded by both communities of masculine women and examples of other individuals who embodied and lived their masculinities in many dif­ ferent ways. Models of inversion, accordingly, must be diversified in order to take the variety of these lives into account. In chapter 4, I take up a more specific embodiment of female mascu­ linity: the stone butch. Although the stone butch has come to signify the most stereotyped of all butch embodiments, I argue that it is the least understood. By attempting to unravel the contradictions between gender, sex, and desire that characterize the stone butch, I try to resist reading her as an example of the failure of a female masculinity that fantasizes its own maleness, and I reconstitute her as a powerful, self-knowing, and wholly viable sexual subject. The stone butch is often cast as a transitional stage on the way to transsexuality. In chapter 5, I examine the borderlands be­ tween lesbian butchness and transsexual maleness. What allows for female embodiment in the case of the butch and refuses such embodiment in the case of the female-to-male transsexual? How do butches and FTMS view their differences? What kinds of community building happen between butches and FTMs? In chapter 6, I trace a different history of butchness, the history of cinematic female masculinity. In this chapter, I produce six different cate­ gories of cinematic butchness, and I outline the requirements and features of each category. I suggest that the butch character need not always be a sign of Hollywood homophobia and may signify a rich history of queer representation. In recent years, however, the most exciting developments in the representation of queer masculinities have taken place not on the screen but in nightclubs within an emergent drag king culture. I have spent a year tracing the form and content of drag king culture in New York, London, and San Francisco, and in chapter 7 I outline the main fea­ tures of drag king shows, contests, cabarets, and performances. In my final chapter, "Raging Bull (Dyke)," I try to bring together the main theories of female masculinity produced within this book, and I relay them through the image on the book's cover, the beautiful painting of the raging bull dyke. This chapter examines the rich scene of the boxing match both for its production of normative masculinity and for its breakdown and then turns from De Niro's raging bull to the rage of the bull dyke and uses a

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personal voice narrative to conclude this exploration of female masculinity. The male boxer, from Rocky Balboa to Jake La Motta, represents for me the spectacle of a battered white male masculinity that always finds a way to win. By replacing this pugilist with the butch raging bull, I offer mas­ culinity a new champion, a legitimate contender, ready to fight all comers and determined to go the distance.

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